A Short Prehistory of Western Music, Chapter 3

India P Tagg: A Short Prehistory of Western Music 35
A t˜la (or t˜l)can be performed in slow, medium or fast tempo. Slow tempo (vilambit)
can be thought of as equivalent to roughly one beat per second (c. 60 bpm), medium
(madhya) as two beats per second (c. 120 bpm) and fast (drut) as about three
beats to the second (c. 180 bpm). One way in which rhythmic interest is created is
for singers and instrumentalists to play the same tala at different speeds. This
means that accents will naturally occur in different places, creating a polyrhythmic
effect. For example, playing Mattat˜l fast superimposed on medium results in the
hemiola pattern shown in 3:8.
3:8 Mattat˜l - 9 matra-s, 3 + 3 + 3 - hemiola accent distribution at two tempi
Another way of creating rhythmic interest is to insert patterns that cut across the
tala’s intrinsic accentuation pattern inside one tempo. One trick is to create agogic
accents by using a run of short notes followed by a longer one (see tehai, p.36), and
to play the longer note at a point where it does not concur with one of the tala’s basic
accents, as in example 9. There, three rhythms are suggested, the first of which
mainly underlines the 4+4+4+4 division of tŸnt˜l. The second line uses the same
crotchet-plus-quavers idea to create four subdivisions of three beats and one of
four. This additive (non-divisive) grouping of tŸnt˜l’s sixteen beats is repeated at the
start of the bottom line, after which additive quaver rhythms are introduced, with
a series of 3/8 figures leading up to the next sum (or ‘one’).
3:9 Conceivable cross-beat patterns for tŸnt˜l
Raga music cross rhythms, performed by the melodic line or on drums, do not have
to be contained within one tala, as in example 9. Sometimes they stretch over the
duration of several cycles, one highly appreciated skill being the ability of concerting
performers to return synchronically to sum (‘one’) after a lengthy episode of radical
rhythmic divergence (see lines 5-16 in example 10, p.37).
Raga performance practice
A serious musician in this tradition should be familiar with over fifty raga-s and a
great number of tala-s before being considered a professional. These skills are
learnt using methods resembling in some ways the training of Western conservatory
musicians: many years of études designed to instill the basic tonal and rhythmic
framework of the tradition. The main difference between the training of
European and Indian classical musicians is, however, that the latter need their
training (i) in order create and improvise, rather than to reproduce and merely interpret,
and (ii) to be able to deal with far greater rhythmic complexity than their